Learn with Homer is the first comprehensive reading application brought to market. It has fun, entertaining games but also includes a rigorous phonics program, challenging literature, and science field trips.

Equipment Street’s vision was to create a digital space where buyers are empowered and sellers can freely compete and win based on the merit of their solution. ThoughtWorks helped them make it a reality.The project that I'm working with ThoughtWorks on is a new site, our web channel, which is called Equipment Street. Which is a marketplace where buyers and sellers are going to meet, and hopefully buy a lot of equipment, and hopefully finance a lot of equipment, which is what we do for a living. This is a start up initiative for us and a huge undertaking because it will change our value proposition to the outside world. What we've been doing is to get a quick piece of functionality, the MVP, the most valuable product, out there for the world to see, rather than waiting six, eight months, or on some projects I've worked with, it could be over a year, before you could take score. After a year of time and expense, it's kind of late. What ThoughtWorks brought to the party was a way to partition the project and get some rapid development out there. Let the community take a look and then we can get some real feedback before you get too deep and too far into it with a lot of money and a lot of expense. It's a good process. First of all, every day at 4:00 PM, whatever I'm doing, we have a team meeting. Typically what we'll talk about is what happened during the day, what's new, what issues, problems. I did a lot of the testing on a daily basis, so as new things are coming, there's a good process where new functionality is posted so I can see it quickly. In addition, because this was very rapid, I spent some time in New York, going and sitting with the team directly. I probably have been with in team maybe four times. And it's really terrific. First of all, it's a great group of people, really smart, energetic, and they really want to do a good job. Which is a good thing. Just going through it with them and giving them the real-time answers, seeing what's happening, I think, led us to hit our project goal. When there was a high and a low, we hit the low target. So, the actual project got done very, very quickly. We went live, believe it or not, in eight weeks. That's exactly right. It is surprising. Because in most larger companies, it would take six months and then the project may not even happen. We actually got it from conception. Meaning when we had the business plan done, approved, and we had the money committed from the day we met. It was really kind of surprising how little time we spent on really detailed requirements. It's more like, let's look at each of these little pieces, figure out what they do, and then build it, rather than waiting so much time on analysis paralysis that you spend a whole lot of money and have nothing. ThoughtWorks was, let's do the hard stuff first. What are the challenges? So when you estimate out all the pieces of functionality, the scary ones, meaning most of the time and most of the effort, we're actually prioritized up front. So, within the first-- really, I think it was really by the 4th week, the biggest, toughest things were already done. The beauty of it is, I don't think we ever got behind. And as we got further and further down, things happened more and more rapidly. Getting the hard stuff done is really, I think, a real important thing. Because as the client, you begin to see how more of those pieces can fit in. Ultimately, we have a much richer application than I thought was possible in phase one. ThoughtWorks has a lot of options. There's offshore. There's onshore. Because we had a very short time frame and with any company, budgets are critical. But the decision was made to use the New York team here, because they're advanced, and it was local. I think that helped because we had a very quick, short time frame to get this thing out and done. By having so many of the bells and whistles, I think in this phase, versus this very, very, what we thought was going to be decent, but not as rich, I think is going to help us get the funding we need to keep going.

Changing the game in the retail food industry.The significance of the new restaurant and store concept was to integrate-- number one, first integrate-- a market concept, a what we call retail food concept into a food service concept. From there, we felt and knew that we needed to really operationalize the space and make it very, very efficient. It's in a mall. It's one of the largest malls in all of Canada. It's one of the most populous. We have hundreds of thousands of people who are passing by the restaurant on a weekly basis. And we knew that we had to provide a great service to those customers through offering food quickly to them, as well as offering great food, which is providing organic and natural food-- food that is antibiotic free, hormone free, that is local-- has been a real focus of ours. And bringing that all together was really what we set out to do. From day one, he had a very, very clear vision about creating a very unique customer experience, whether it was in their restaurants or if it was in their grocery formats. And that's, I think, what grocers and retailers today are faced with. It takes them from being undifferentiated to being completely differentiated. We knew that everything had to be consistent, from both the customer experience and also behind the scenes for the data. And so we decided to pick technologies that we're both mature enough to support what we needed but not so bound up with their decisions that it dictated the vision that Natural Markets was able to take. When we opened the Richtree Natural Market Restaurants here at the Eaton Centre, we put together the best in technology to really allow the customer to have the choice. Our goal is to let the customer pay any way they want throughout our entire market area. From an operational perspective, we really wanted to find a way to bring together many ways of ordering that is transparent to the customer so that they can order while they're on a train and pick up their meal at our Express to go. At the same time, we wanted to be able to allow a customer to stand at a kiosk and order from multiple kitchens while sitting at our Foundation Bar and enjoying a drink. We created a mobile application that allowed our customers to quickly download it, associate it to a credit card, and then utilize it at every station, keep track of their orders. And it enabled them to really feel like they had one form of payment that they could quickly utilize or furnish across these stations without having to take out a credit card or without having to see multiple transactions on their bill. Our core focus was, how are we going to really improve payment and people being able to enjoy great food across multiple areas? So getting in-depth with market paths, we took a multipronged approach to this. And we started with a minimum viable product. The minimum viable product hits at the core of our message around service augmentation, and allows a customer to check out quickly. That's it. Another area that we really focused on was children-- making it a family friendly environment. So you can see what we did with the children's interactive wall. We call it the Market Garden. It's a farm-type theme, so it's consistent with the Richtree Natural Market brand, but it allows kids have a good time. We have tables nearby where parents can enjoy a meal while their kids play and have a good time. Natural Markets is really doing something important for society. The importance of getting healthy and organic food to people during the midst of a busy work day. Through their location and shopping centers, their grocery stores, and the combination stores like the Eaton Centre here with a restaurant and a grocery together, we truly got excited on getting behind this. The industry itself is growing and to have a player with the integrity of the Natural Markets folks-- doing the bold things they're doing-- we couldn't ask for a better partner. We've got to continue to strive to take a mobile experience, which is a very individual experience, and really make that personal. So in terms of going into a grocery store and buying food on your mobile phone and not even having to interact with a cashier, that's something that we absolutely want to do, but we also want to ensure that we're still providing a great experience.